Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Have you heard about the Indoctrinate U movie? It's a great documentary about the sad state of free speech at university campuses. Obviously, the US-made movie focuses on the US universities, but as we've seen in the past few weeks, our universities aren't any better.

Speech codes. Censorship. Enforced political conformity. Hostility to diversity of opinion. Sensitivity training. We usually associate such things with the worst excesses of fascism and communism, not with the American universities that nurtured the free speech movement. But American higher education bears a disturbing resemblance to the totalitarian societies that are anathema to our nation's ideal of liberty. Evan Coyne Maloney's documentary film, Indoctrinate U, reveals the breathtaking institutional intolerance you won't read about in the glossy marketing brochures of Harvard, Berkeley, Michigan, Yale, and hundreds of other American colleges and universities.

While the movie itself is unlikely to be shown in a local theater, you can still watch a few deleted scenes on the documentary website. Check out the story of how 1960s campus radicals morphed into today's academics. Follow the documentary makers on their quest to obtain a permit to film on campus. (Is filming at Columbia /university/ any easier than filming in, say, Venezuela?) Observe an intellectual academic debate between campus radicals and the US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. See how mere two sentences in what would otherwise be an A- paper could get someone expelled. And don't forget to request a local screening (too bad their system won't accept a Canadian postal code).